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Golan v. Holder

The FUP filed this suit on behalf of a University of Denver conductor and others, challenging Congress’s restoration of copyright to works that had entered the public domain.

In 1994, Congress passed a law that removed a vast body of foreign works from the public domain. Congress took the rights in these works from the American public and handed them over to foreign authors and their heirs in the express hope that foreign countries would reciprocate by giving U.S. copyright owners new rights in works that were in the public domains of those foreign countries. In other words, Congress decided to give away the public's property—and the important speech and expression rights that go with it—in the hope this might put more money in the pocket of U.S. copyright owners.

In 2001, representing conductor Lawrence Golan and others, we brought a constitutional challenge to this law. After years of litigation, the case came before the United States Supreme Court in 2011. Before the Court, we urged that the Constitution does not allow Congress to privatize the public domain and that, by doing so, it violated the First Amendment rights of our clients and the American public. We expect a decision from the Supreme Court early this year.

Julie is a Non-Residential fellow with Stanford CIS. She represents writers, filmmakers, musicians, and others who rely on fair use in creating their works. Julie has represented visual artist Shepard Fairey in copyright litigation against The Associated Press over Fairey’s “Obama Hope” posters, RDR Books in its copyright and Lanham Act dispute with J.K.

Daniel is a Staff Attorney and Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He is part of EFF's intellectual property team and focuses on patent reform. Before joining EFF, Daniel was a Residential Fellow at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet & Society where he represented writers, painters, filmmakers, and others who rely on fair use to create their art and scholarship.

It was my great honor to argue for the petitioners in Golan v. Holder before the Supreme Court of the United States last week. SCOTUS blog has an excellent recap of the argument on its case page, and the Court has posted the transcript and audio recording.

UPDATE: The government's brief and our reply are now posted below. Oral argument is scheduled for October 5. Today we filed our opening brief in the U.S. Supreme Court challenging Congress's power to remove works from the public domain. For 200 years, the Copyright Act placed a huge array of works into the public domain through a combination of term limits and eligibility requirements. It created a vast reservoir of knowledge, learning and artistic creativity that millions of us use every day. Since creating the public domain in 1790, Congress amended the Copyright Act again and again to cover new types of works and lengthen copyright terms. But each time it did so, it left the public domain completely intact. It respected the fact that the public domain is public property, and cannot not be taken away. That changed in 1994, when Congress passed a law that removed a vast body of foreign works from the public domain. This body of works included symphonies by Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinksy and Dmitri Shostakovich; books by C.S. Lewis, Virginia Woolf and H.G. Wells; films by Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renoir; and artwork by M.C. Escher and Pablo Picasso. The Register of Copyrights estimated the works affected by this law "probably number in the millions." Congress took the rights in these works from the American public and handed them over to foreign authors and their heirs in the express hope that foreign countries would reciprocate by giving U.S. copyright owners new rights in works that were in the public domains of those foreign countries. In other words, Congress decided to give away the public's property -- and the important speech and expression rights that go with it -- in the hope this might put more money in the pocket of U.S. copyright owners. In the brief we filed today, we explain why the Constitution does not allow Congress to privatize the public domain and why doing so here violated the First Amendment rights of our clients and the American public. We expect the Court to hear the case this fall, with a decision to follow several months later.

A total of 52 different organizations filed sixteen amicus briefs in the Supreme Court supporting Lawrence Golan and the other petitioners in Golan v. Holder, including the ACLU, American Library Association, Cato Institute, Creative Commons, Google, Internet Archive, Public Knowledge, and Yale Information Society Project. A complete list appears below, with links to each brief.

Golan v. Holder involves a challenge to the constitutionality of the 1994 Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA), which restored copyright in foreign works previously in the public domain under U.S. copyright law. The plaintiffs in the case have challenged the URAA as contravening both the "limited times" requirement and the First Amendment. In October 2011, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case and is expected to issue a ruling before June 2012.